He looked back down at the ground. Broken scraps of the aircraft seemed to have started digging themselves into the peat, like burrowing animals anxious to escape the wind and snow, but never quite making it to safety below ground.
‘There were so many during the war,’ he said. ‘The Peak District is littered with them.’
In fact, there had been so many that aircraft wrecks had entered local folklore. Even today, there were tales of a ghostly plane that had been heard, and even seen, over parts of the Dark Peak. Witnesses had been convinced that the aircraft must surely have crashed into the hillside because it was flying so low. No wreckage could ever be found, but it didn’t stop the stories.
There was also said to be a German bomber that lay somewhere on the remote northern moors after being shot down during a raid on Manchester. German-made cartridge cases had been picked up in the area, but no one had ever seen signs of wreckage there, either. Cooper wondered if that was one animal that had reached its burrow, ploughing through the peat at a hundred miles an hour as it fell from the sky. A few years ago, archaeologists digging in a peat bog in Cheshire had found the body of an Iron Age man, petrified and almost complete. Would the peat here have preserved the bodies of the Luftwaffe crew too, with their skin dry and leathery and their eyes hardened like bullets?
‘Although I don’t think this one crashed during the war. It was 1948 – that Superfortress down there was from an American photographic unit. The crew had recorded the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and filmed the Russian positions in East Germany during the Berlin Airlift.’
‘But Derbyshire finished them off.’
Cooper lifted an eyebrow at the grim pleasure in Sergeant Caudwell’s voice. He stared out of the helicopter window, surprised at the extent of the debris strewn across the moorland. On the way to the site, Cooper had found himself filling in the time by telling Jane Caudwell the story of the crash of Sugar Uncle Victor and the disappearance of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague. Before he’d finished, her eyes had closed.
‘I’m surprised nobody clears the wrecks away,’ said Caudwell. ‘Aren’t they offensive to the tidy minds of our bureaucrats?’
‘Not here. In the Peak District they let them stay. They’re memorials, after all. They’re official war graves. I always think it’s funny how that can be, though. I mean – the bodies aren’t still down there, are they?’
‘We hope not, dear.’
They levelled out again and flew northwards, passing over acres of white, peat-flecked ground, rolling oceans of it that swelled in waves towards the fringes of the Dark Peak. It was barely more than a minute before they located another scatter of wreckage.
‘That’s the one. Sugar Uncle Victor.’
Caudwell gave a chuckle. ‘Sounds like a naughty relative, doesn’t it?’
As the helicopter banked, she hardly used her hands to brace herself, preferring to let her weight roll and wallow in the seat, at times pushing against Cooper’s side like a heavy piece of loose cargo. Her colleague PC Steve Nash had barely acknowledged his presence since they climbed aboard, and he wasn’t sure whether it was indifference or whether Nash was silently terrified of the flight and dealing with it in his own way. Cooper was determined not to take it personally, anyway.
Below them, the remains of the Lancaster bomber’s wings lay in tatters on the moor. Little of the fuselage was left, but there was a ragged line of burnt-out engines and undercarriage parts, and a single wheel still standing upright. Smaller fragments were scattered for several hundred feet through a series of water channels and groughs. Around the wreckage, the wind had scraped the dark peat bare. Against the snow, it looked like a pool of dried blood in which the broken body of the aircraft lay.
‘They must have taken some of the parts away after the crash,’ said Caudwell.
‘It depends who you mean by “they”,’ said Cooper. ‘There was no official salvage team. But there have been unofficial ones since. Apparently, there are two kinds of visitors to these wrecks – the aviation archaeologists, who want to preserve the remains, and the others, who have their own interests.’
‘The vultures?’
‘Some people call them that.’ Cooper thought he detected a note of irony. ‘The more valuable parts of the Lancaster have been removed over the years. I suppose things like the radio equipment would have been the first to go, followed by anything that was movable, anything that could be sold as scrap or might be considered a souvenir or collector’s item.’
‘Local people?’
‘At first. For a long time, they would have been the only ones who knew the location of these wrecks. The others have arrived more recently.’
Who was it that had said the Home Guard men sent to watch over the wrecked plane hadn’t been too keen on their task? Cooper couldn’t blame them, not in the dead of winter on the Dark Peak moors. Staying alive was enough for a man to concentrate on if he found himself out here, particularly at night and as ill-equipped as they would have been in those days, with hobnailed boots and heavy service greatcoats. He could picture the Home Guard sneaking off to some sheltered spot to huddle together around a camp fire made of salvaged spars from the aircraft they were supposed to be guarding. They would have stood no chance of preventing local people from liberating items of value. It had been wartime, after all. It was every man for himself when it came to survival. But Danny McTeague had taken it further than that.
Caudwell was looking straight ahead, over the shoulder of the pilot, unmoved by the snow-covered landscape passing below them. She seemed to be watching for bad weather coming from the north, or maybe for the next outcrop of high ground appearing in front of them, just as the rocks of Irontongue Hill had appeared in front of Pilot Officer Danny McTeague in the final seconds.
The low sun misted the valley and gleamed yellow on the icy water of a small drinking hole made by a farmer for his livestock. There were cattle huddled below a wall, nervous of stepping on to the concrete lip of the drinking hole because they could feel their hooves slipping on the frozen surface.
Now there was more snow coming. The air had been bitterly cold, but now the chill had eased and there was a dampness about it, an impending heaviness that came from the dark clouds gathering over the Eastern Edges before they dropped their load on the higher hills to the west.
Cooper found himself gazing up at Sergeant Caudwell as the helicopter banked. She yawned and stretched, almost pushing him off his seat. Her dark hair was scraped up inside a fake fur hat like a Russian commissar’s. He felt unreasonably uncomfortable with Caudwell. Though on the surface she maintained the normal courtesies, there was a restrained hostility about her. It wasn’t the overt edginess he’d grown used to from others, but something deeper that he felt he ought not to rouse.
‘Have you seen what you wanted?’ he asked.
‘I want to get down there. I need to get a closer look at the Lancaster wreck.’
‘There’s nowhere to set down safely here,’ said the pilot.
‘We’re going to have to walk up then, I suppose,’ said Caudwell. ‘Detective Constable Cooper, could you arrange for a scenes of crime officer to accompany us, please?’
Cooper stared at her. ‘I don’t know what you’re hoping to find. We carried out a forensic examination on Friday, after the remains of the baby were found. But they were old bones.’
‘Not as old as the crew of the Lancaster, eh?’
Every police officer knew that there was nothing worse than going over cold ground, sifting through old bones. And there weren’t many bones much colder than these. Wouldn’t it have been better to let those fliers rest in peace, rather than raking over their graves and stirring up their ghosts?
‘I think it’s crazy,’ said Cooper.
Caudwell smiled at him again, and her cheeks dimpled. Every time the MDP sergeant smiled, Cooper felt as though he was about to be swallowed up and spat out by a giant rodent, an enormous hamster in a fur hat.
‘No doubt yo
u’re right, dear,’ said Caudwell. ‘Sometimes it seems the whole world’s gone crazy, doesn’t it?’
More hillsides and more miles of snow passed below them as the helicopter made its turn to head back to base. At first, the shape created by the spread of the wreckage had made Cooper think of a crucifixion. But he knew he had it wrong. This had nothing to do with Christianity – there was no message of death and resurrection, the forgiveness of sins. It was something more pagan that he was thinking of. Not a resurrection, only a celebration of death.
A few weeks ago, Cooper had been reading about the Danish invaders who’d occupied Derbyshire and neighbouring counties for a while. Their army had made a point of executing defeated Saxon kings in the most gruesome way. Their chests had been cut open and their ribcages spread on either side like wings, to expose their hearts. It was a symbolic act, a celebratory sacrifice to their Norse gods. The act was called a ‘Blood Eagle’. It was uncomfortably like the process involved in a postmortem examination – the cutting open of the sternum, the spreading of the ribcage, the removal of heart and lungs and other internal organs. Cooper had never been able to escape the notion that every autopsy was a ritual sacrifice, a ceremony dedicating the victim to the new god of science.
But the memory had made the shape of the wreckage clear to him. It wasn’t shaped like a crucifixion at all – it was a blood eagle.
On the way up to the Snake Pass, Cooper had to put on his sunglasses as they climbed higher and the snow-covered slopes on either side dazzled him with their reflected glare. In the valley, the snow hadn’t lingered so long on the banks of dead bracken, though it still showed through the copses of bare trees, like the exposed lining of a threadbare overcoat. The plantations of conifers further up the valley were different. In the sunlight, the lines of spruces glowed orange against the blue sheen of the snow.
Then, on the higher slopes, there was no bracken, only coarse grass with frozen snow clinging to its stems. Looking southwards, into the sun, the moor looked like an ocean, all its waves and swells solidifying as they reached the shore.
Today, there was no mistaking the flight path for Manchester Airport. In the sky were the vapour trails of six or seven jet airliners, each one white and distinct. One of the greatest fears of the emergency services was that an airliner would one day fall out of the sky as it was passing over the high ground of the Dark Peak. There were enough wrecks lying on the remote moors already for everyone to be aware of the difficulties involved in a rescue plan.
They parked their vehicles in the lay-by nearest to Irontongue Hill. It wasn’t the one where Nick Easton had been found, but further up, almost at the highest point of the Snake Pass. Cooper pulled his Toyota in behind the MDP’s Ford and the Scientific Support van. He was pleased to see that the SOCO they’d sent was Liz Petty. She was conscientious, but she was also fitter than some of the other scenes of crime staff and would have no problem with the hike across the moor to the crash site.
‘What a beautiful day for a brisk walk,’ said Sergeant Caudwell cheerfully. ‘How long will it take us?’
‘About three-quarters of an hour, if we keep up a steady pace.’
‘No slacking then, eh?’
‘Will you be all right?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’m like a camel. I may not look pretty, but I can keep going for hours.’
In the cold, bright morning, the walk to the top of Irontongue Hill was exhilarating. The sky was blue and cloudless, and the moors looked unsullied, their tracts of untouched snow glittering temptingly. The only patterns on the landscape were those caused by the different textures of light falling on the northern slopes, by the shadows in a sudden dip, or the bright highlights of a rocky summit. Further south, in the limestone areas of the White Peak, the drystone walls carved up the landscape into containable sections, forcing the snow into some kind of order, with here and there a line of trees breaking through. But on the empty Dark Peak moorland, the snow had its own way. It had filled every cranny, sculpting the world to a shape of its own creation.
These cold, bright days were good. But Cooper knew how quickly the weather could change. If cloud descended on the tops, they could be in the middle of a snowstorm before they got halfway back across the moor.
They crunched over the frozen heather into an easterly wind that picked up small swirls of powdery snow and blew them around like miniature blizzards before dropping them again, as if fussily rearranging the landscape to get the best reflection from the sun. In the deeper areas, the snow had been formed into whipped cream shapes or had been left draped in mid-air over a gully, like the scalloped edges of a table cloth. Below it, a stream ran under a thin skin of ice.
Cooper could see that somebody had been this way already, but not today. A fine dusting of snow had blown into their footprints. There was a distant cackle of black grouse, and a human voice somewhere far away, over the other side of the summit.
They stopped for a breather when they reached the trig point on Irontongue Hill, where a cairn marked the summit. The bare rock face dropped away from them on one side, back down to the Snake. Across a narrow valley was the next outcrop of rock, High Shelf, where the wreckage of the American Superfortress lay.
‘What a job you’ve got,’ said Caudwell. ‘And you say you’re short staffed!’
Liz Petty had hardly said a word all the way. But now she put her case down and took in the view.
‘Days like this make up for the poor wages,’ she said. Cooper smiled at her.
‘Don’t. You’ll have me in tears,’ said Caudwell.
Beyond High Shelf was a distant view down into Glossop. The hills fell away from the edge of the Dark Peak to a hollow in which the town sat, surrounded by the remains of the textile mills that had once been its main industry. At least Glossop seemed to have grown out of its landscape, like one of those complex eco-systems that formed of their own accord in a pool of stagnant water, given time.
But then, out past Glossop, Cooper could see nothing but a grey wall where the world seemed to come to an end. It reminded him of a scene from a horror novel he’d once read, in which a small American town had been cut off from the rest of the country by an alien fog where vast monsters lurked. But he knew that, beneath the grimy blanket he could see in the distance, there were no monsters, only the city of Manchester.
On a warm summer’s day, the white tower blocks of the city centre could look like the battlements of a fairy-tale city or a shimmering mirage lying in the plain. But not today. This morning, the uncompromisingly clear winter light exposed every atom of the pollution that hung over the city, every swirl of smoke from a factory chimney, every wisp of exhaust from the traffic choking the streets. With no warm thermals to lift it clear of the city, the smog had gathered and thickened, and now it lay like a huge grey rat coiled on its nest. Cooper shuddered. It would be a salutary experience for many a city dweller to take a trip up to High Shelf on a day like this and get a bird’s-eye view of their city. They would hardly dare to breathe again.
Liz Petty turned away from the view and looked up at him thoughtfully.
‘It’s hard to imagine how they could have crashed here,’ she said. ‘It’s so ironic somehow.’
‘At night, in low cloud, it would be a different place altogether,’ said Cooper. ‘It would have been a far more dangerous place.’
Cooper pictured Lancaster SU-V coming low across the valley from the south, the rumble of its engines muffled by the blanket of cloud, the crew peering hopelessly from the cockpit windows or from their Perspex gun turrets. He imagined the bomb aimer, Colin Mee, lying in his position in the nose turret, looking down and catching a glimpse of the ground rising towards them. Perhaps Mee would have tapped urgently on the feet of the pilot above him, gesturing upwards as he mouthed: ‘Climb! Climb!’ And McTeague would surely then have heaved back on the controls and Lancaster SU-V would have begun to gain height.
At the rear of the aircraft, young Dick Abbott wouldn’t have
known what was happening, until he’d suddenly been thrown forward in his harness towards the Perspex bubble as the aircraft climbed. He would have found himself hanging helplessly, almost upside down, with his view tilted so that he could see the hillside winking through a patch of cloud. And he might have heard the frightened voices shouting in his headphones.
But by then it was already too late. The stark face of Irontongue Hill would have been directly in front of them. Maybe the crew had seen it coming towards them a second before the impact, a huge black shape hurtling out of the cloud where there should have been only sky. But it had been too late by then. Far too late.
28
DCI Tailby looked around the conference room. He frowned. Fry had noticed that he was doing a lot of frowning these days. He’d never been a barrel of laughs, but his last few weeks at E Division were proving to be a burden on him.
‘We don’t seem to see much of DC Cooper at these meetings,’ said Tailby.
‘Everybody is so busy,’ said Hitchens. ‘There are so many actions. So many interviews to do.’
‘I know that. Is Cooper all right? He wasn’t injured in the incident last night?’
‘No, he’s fine. He reported for duty as normal this morning, and he’s gone out with Sergeant Caudwell. The MDP asked to visit the site of the aircraft wreck.’
‘He’s with Sergeant Caudwell? You’ve thrown him to the dogs then?’
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly, sir,’ said Hitchens.
‘When things get difficult, there’s a temptation to look around for a sacrifice,’ said Tailby.
Fry blinked. She’d never heard their old DCI get so philosophical before. Perhaps he wanted to put on a display of wisdom in his final days before he handed over to Kessen, so that the contrast would be all the greater.
‘I’m told Sergeant Caudwell asked for a scenes of crime officer as well. What is she hoping to find?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Hitchens.
Tailby frowned. ‘I’m happy that we’re co-operating. But there comes a point when co-operation has to be mutual.’
Blood on the Tongue (Ben Cooper & Diane Fry) Page 33